PHILADELPHIA — Take that, Andy Reid. Ha! That was payback for sending us Brad Childress. Next time, keep your assistant coaches to yourself if you know what’s good for you.

Look at what Leslie Frazier’s Traveling Circus did to the Philadelphia Eagles on Tuesday night. Reid’s Eagles are fighting for seeding position in the playoffs. The Vikings are fighting off boredom. But all the bad guys received payback on Tuesday. The NFL saw its darling Eagles go up in flames. Reid, who created the Childress monster, lost a big game.

Meanwhile, the Vikings remain undefeated on Tuesdays. Forget all that Sunday and Monday stuff. The Vikings finally found a day on which they can shine. But some weren’t too happy about it.

“This was the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Pat Williams said. “It was b.s. Play the damn game. We should have played on Sunday.”

Pat was getting agitated. He’s spent the past four days eating Philly cheesesteaks and hanging around the team hotel.

Well, not only did they leave the game early, they also pelted the Vikings’ team bus with snowballs when it pulled into the stadium. That wasn’t very nice.

“Man, I am so tired of sitting around that hotel,” Kevin Williams said. “We heard they really protested about playing on Sunday. That was extra motivation. Some of the players were saying it on the field: ‘We didn’t want to play in that crap.’ They didn’t want to play in the snow! It was extra motivation for us.”

They put that motivation to good use. Feeling a bit unloved by the league after being jerked around schedule-wise, they took it out on the Eagles. With young Joe Webb at quarterback, they needed to keep it simple and rely on a stout defense and Adrian Peterson, the team’s only Pro Bowl representative. Even though Peterson took a pop on his bad knee on the first play, he finished with 118 yards and a touchdown.

“It was pretty painful,” Peterson said. “I got it treated a couple of times, but I knew I had to play through the pain.”

The trainers put a protective pad over the knee. Peterson said that helped. He was one of the few who were happy to play on Tuesday instead of Sunday. The knee would have hampered him, he said. The two extra days helped. But he appeared to be in the minority. Most guys were not happy about being forced to wait a couple of days.

“We should just go right to Detroit,” Visanthe Shiancoe offered.

Still, the whole thing didn’t feel quite right. It was as if everyone’s body clock was off. Tuesday nights are for grocery shopping or bowling. Not for football. And everything seemed out of kilter. The players certainly were out of whack: sure interceptions dropped, fumbles rolling hither and yon and a general sort of careening from sideline to sideline.

Who said Tuesday’s child is full of grace?

Frazier couldn’t even throw the challenge flag properly. He appeared to have a beef on a 28-yard pass play from Michael Vick to Jeremy Maclin in the first quarter. Maclin may not have gotten his feet in bounds. But Frazier reached for his challenge flag and bobbled it. It went backward. His headset, however, went forward. By the time he retrieved the flag and tossed it on the field, the Eagles had run a play and it was too late. One play later, Philly took a 7-0 lead.

The officials caucused endlessly, usually to announce, “There was no foul.” They once moved the football 50 yards downfield. Then brought it back to the original line of scrimmage and had the clock reset. Flags fell out of their pockets by accident. Even referee Mike Carey was laughing. Nobody had a very good handle on what was going on.

The thing is, a helter-skelter football game that appears to have no rhyme or reason is not a good thing for a finely tuned team such as the Philadelphia Eagles. But for a normally discombobulated team such as the Vikings, it’s fabulous. Coming to the end of a season filled with chaos, the Vikings thrived on disorder Tuesday night.

It didn’t help the Eagles that Michael Vick was horrible. The Vikings defense harassed him all night and made it really tough. If I were an Eagles fan in the stands, I’d have thrown Kibbles and Bits at him. He was that bad.

So take that, Andy Reid. Don’t send us any more of your assistants. And take that, NFL. You don’t know who you’re fooling with when you mess with the Vikings.

Shiancoe put his hand on the shoulder of a Minnesota writer and said sympathetically: “You’re just like us. You’re supposed to be home giving out Christmas presents.”

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